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Intel's Alder Lake big.LITTLE CPU design, tested: It's a barn burner:
After spending several days with Intel's newest consumer CPU designs, we have some surprising news: they're faster than AMD's latest Ryzens on both single-threaded and most multithreaded benchmarks.
We suspect this will be especially surprising to some, since Intel's newest desktop CPUs feature a hybrid "big.little[sic]" design similar to those found in ARM CPUs. AMD's flagship Ryzen 9 5950x is a traditional 16 core, 32 thread design, with all cores being "big" high-performance types with symmetric multithreading (SMT, also known as "hyperthreading"). By contrast, the i9-12900K offers 16 cores and only 24 threads—with eight "performance" cores featuring SMT and eight lower-performance "efficiency" cores with no SMT.
As pointed out in the Ars Technica comments, the Cinebench multi-threaded benchmark saw Intel's best CPU with a less than 2.5% lead, but the caption reads "Intel trounces AMD". While the Passmark multi-threaded benchmark saw AMD's best CPU with a more than 18% lead, but the caption reads "outperform i9-12900k-but even here, by a much, much, lower margin than we're accustomed to seeing".
Also at Phoronix, AnandTech, and Tom's Hardware.
See also: More Linux Performance Benchmark Data For Alder Lake, Comparison Data Points
Intel UHD Graphics 770 / Alder Lake GT1 Linux Graphics Performance
Previously: Intel Alder Lake CPUs Launch November 4th, with Up to 8 Big and 8 Small Cores
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Thursday November 04 2021, @09:10PM (2 children)
Actually, we got the leak yesterday. So I'll just repurpose this comment I was writing.
Not only will Intel double and quadruple the small core count, but AMD will also go hybrid/heterogeneous/big.LITTLE by Zen 5 [videocardz.com].
Alder Lake will act as a(nother) beta test for big/small. Then Raptor Lake will include 8+16 and by then Windows and Linux should be able to handle it better. Then AMD will also do 8+16. Then Intel will go to 8+32. And so on.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 04 2021, @10:40PM (1 child)
That is... Not big.little. That is a CPU with more cores and less cache.
AMD said last year that they have no plans to follow suit unless clear benefits are demonstrated.
https://www.techradar.com/news/amd-has-a-subtle-dig-at-intel-suggesting-alder-lake-cpus-dont-make-sense [techradar.com]
https://www.pcgamer.com/amp/amd-ryzen-hybrid-architecture-big-little-intel-alder-lake/ [pcgamer.com]
While Alder Lake is a good performing CPU, it doesn't seem like the E cores are helping much with that. It seems like they mostly cause problems for the OS.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday November 04 2021, @11:10PM
Less cache is definitely part of it, and Zen 4D will not be ~25% the size of Zen 5 cores according to the leak, more like 50%. But part of why Alder Lake's small cores are so small is also because they have less cache, and there's more that can be chopped off from regular/big Zen 4, such as AVX-512. And as seen in my journal (see the full page 2 of AnandTech's review [anandtech.com]), Intel was planning to launch with AVX-512 on the big cores and not the small cores, but disabled it at the last minute to mitigate scheduling issues.
Alder Lake's small cores actually have IPC around Comet Lake cores [anandtech.com], just running at lower clock speeds. The small/E-cores are definitely helping Alder Lake beat the Ryzen 9 5950X in some benchmarks.
AMD will walk onto the scene with their own version of big.LITTLE. It pretty much accomplishes the same thing as Alder Lake since the Zen 4D cores will have less single-threaded performance but two of them will outperform a Zen 5 core. As a bonus, the Zen 4D chiplets can be made on the older TSMC node to save some money. That complicates a die area comparison with Zen 5, but it should be possible to compare Zen 4 die shots to Zen 4D, both being made on the same TSMC "5nm" node.
AMD will let Intel deal with the OS issues for now. Zen 5 + Zen 4D is a late 2023 product at the earliest.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]